Posted
by
samzenpuson Thursday March 18, 2010 @11:55AM
from the chip-the-glasses-and-crack-the-plates dept.

krou writes "Sir Ian McKellen has revealed that filming for The Hobbit and its sequel is scheduled to begin in July, and will take approximately a year to complete. Casting is now 'taking place in LA, London and New York,' and [director Guillermo] Del Toro is already 'living in Wellington, close to the Jacksons and the studio in Miramar.' Apparently the script is still being worked on, and 'the first draft is crammed with old and new friends, again on a quest in Middle-earth.' The planned sequel to The Hobbit is to be an original story not written by Tolkien, covering the 60 years between The Hobbit, and The Lord of the Rings."

Furries? Let's see, what roles could they play... a spider? Naw. How about a goblin? Nope. A warg? Hm... a nasty super-wolf ridden by green midgets. Maybe. A Great Eagle? No way. A troll? Not a chance. Well, I guess all those furries are going to be disappointed, since the wargs in LOTR were CG.

Are you kidding?! A giant, primal, jovial "skin-changer" is on-screen gold. Plus the giant bees, plus dogs/ponies/horses performing human domestic tasks. Plus his integral role in the climax of the Battle of Five Armies. Bombadil (and the Barrow-wights encounter) was easier to drop because he really was unessential the primary story of the Lord of the Rings, although he did add great depth and mystery to the world.

I also believe that Beorn and Radagast will make great side/supporting characters for the sequ

I've been holding off on getting LOTR set for bluray until this came out. I was wavering and even a week ago thought "maybe i should just buy it, there won't be a hobit movie"...glad to know my stubborness is paying off.

Sounds like the filler episodes in anime, when they've already make all the current manga into anime, but want to make more anime something anyway. And we all know how great those are.

For those of you not familiar with anime, that last part was sarcasm. Filler episodes are utterly craptastic. In that case, because the story continues on as if nothing significant happened in the time the filler is showing, any plot or character development has to be disposable. Nothing happens.

Same thing here. What could happen in the sequel to the hobbit? Spoiler: none of the characters that are in lord of the rings will die in the prequel, wheras any characters they introduce will die before the events in lord of the rings or will have to come up with some reason they're insignificant for lord of the rings.

I heard George Lucas is writing it. Young Gollum will be a comedy character to lighten the mood. His appearance has been changed a bit to appeal to the 5-10 age range that have the most pester power over merchandise sales, e.g. big floppy bunny ears. To save time it will all be CGI scenery. Human actors will be dosed with Thorazine to make them more docile and easier to pose.

I heard George Lucas is writing it. Young Gollum will be a comedy character to lighten the mood. His appearance has been changed a bit to appeal to the 5-10 age range that have the most pester power over merchandise sales, e.g. big floppy bunny ears.

I believe that during that time is actually when [Young Gollum ] is being tortured in mordor

Change the name to "Jarjar does not simply walk into MORDOR!" and I'll pay to watch the movie in 3D.

Comic: "I just flew in from LA, and boy are my arms tired. heh heh hah hah."Wisnoskij: "Based on the morphological and kinematic data you would need significantly more lift than your arms could provide in order to fly."

'The planned sequel to The Hobbit is to be an *original story not written by Tolkien*'

Pretty much like most of Jackson's version of 'The Two Towers', then!

Actually, I wonder how accurate the BBC story is. Jackson and del toro have suggested elsewhere that they intend to spread out the story of 'The Hobbit' over both films, supplemented by material about (e.g.) Gandalf and Dol Guldur:

Depends. Tolkien didn't flesh those years out much beyond a general timeline, so there's nothing for them to outright destroy. As long as they do enough research to stick with the general setting and history, it could work out well.

"The planned sequel to The Hobbit is to be an *original story not written by Tolkien*, covering the 60 years between The Hobbit, and the Lord of the Rings."

Thanks but no thanks.

The summary is wrong, from TFA:

"According to studio New Line, the first film will be an adaptation of The Hobbit, the novel Tolkien published before his Lord of the Rings cycle.
The second will be an original story focusing on the 60 years between the book and the beginning of the Rings trilogy. "

"The planned sequel to The Hobbit is to be an *original story not written by Tolkien*, covering the 60 years between The Hobbit, and the Lord of the Rings."

The summary is wrong, from TFA:

"According to studio New Line, the first film will be an adaptation of The Hobbit, the novel Tolkien published before his Lord of the Rings cycle.The second will be an original story focusing on the 60 years between the book and the beginning of the Rings trilogy. "

So we're getting a hobbit movie AND a new story.

So you're saying, we're getting "The Hobbit" movie, and a planned sequel to "The Hobbit" which is to be an *original story not written by Tolkien*, covering the 60 years between The Hobbit, and the Lord of the Rings."?

Yes, but Tolkien left a large gap in there that could be filled in with a story pretty easily.

When we leave "The Hobbit", Bilbo Baggins is still a young Hobbit in his 50s, flush with treasure. When we start "Lord of the Rings", he's 111 (a ripe old age only attained by liberal use of The One Ring) and his nephew Frodo takes over. There are a lot of good stories about what uses he put the Ring to, if nothing else. Frodo might deserve a bit of a back-story. I'm sure Sauron and Saruman weren't sitting arou

I'll wait and see - there's a tremendous amount of material that Tolkien wrote covering that period - various time lines, appendices, lost tales etc. If they do that material justice, it might be fun. Doesn't Gandalf get trapped in Sauron's old hang-out in Mirk Wood, apart from anything else?.... Gandalf and Jar Jar Binks, together at last!

Well, Tolkien did tell us all the things that happened in those 60 years, so it's not like they are going to *completely* make it up. No matter how hard they tried, they couldn't come up with a better story, than, say, the recolonization and fall of Moria, or the fight against the Necromancer in Mirkwood. My money is on the former. It will be called "Moria", and the tag line will be "They are coming..."

Also, Galadriel isn't the same kind of elf as the ones in The Hobbit, if I remember correctly. They are the elves who remained in Middle-Earth instead of going to Valinor, Galadriel is part of the gang that went to Valinor and came back to Middle-Earth later.

The screenplay writer, Mrs. Jackson, expanded the role of female characters in the Lord of Rings, I presume to add balance. It appears they are doing the same for the Hobbit. The Hobbit novel is even more all-male than LOTR.

Yes. This is what I don't understand. The 60 years in between the Hobbit and the LotR is so utterly boring that Gandalf is surprised he's had the One Ring under his nose (although he had suspicions). It was all "rumors of a necromancer", Biblo living quietly in the Shire, and Aragorn living in the woods and scaring the locals.

Well, Gandalf spent a lot of time doing stuff in those years. The Hobbit even has him mentioning that he needs to do something about the Necromancer (where he rescued Thorin's father and got the map to the entrance of Lonely Mountain). Meanwhile Sauron has gone from being semi-hidden to moving to Moria and rebuilding his armies. There are councils of the wise where Saruman pretends to be a good guy. There is the search for Gollum (which is also an online fan made movie). There is Aragorn growing up and

Oh joy, another visually stunning film with a disjointed script, mixing Tolkien's brilliant timeless dialog with flat modern drivel penned by Fran Walsh. And the sequel... that's just going to be visually stunning with drivel for plot and dialog.

It wouldn't be so bad if they didn't screw up the plot and dialog so badly. Ugh.

Tolkien wrote dialogue? I thought his books were fantasy travelogues: descriptions of places, leaving places, walking through places, and arriving at other places. I don't remember much in the way of dialogue. I just remember lots of walking. Oh, and maybe a few spiders and a dragon or something.

You see, in order to have 'brilliant timeless dialogue' your characters have to have interesting motivations. The Hobbit was a classic adventure story, which quite simply does not lend itself to interesting motivati

Are we referring to the same Tolkien, here? If you read his books, you see that J.R.R. Tolkien was not much of a writer of dialogues or painter of characters. What he was, though, was a designer of worlds of epic proportions. Tolkien's Middle Earth is what made The Lord of the Rings what it is, not the banter of transient characters.

Tolkien's dialogue can't, and never could, survive a direct adaptation to the big screen. Even if it could be managed, people would still complain that the actors didn't act in the manner that they themselves had envisioned while reading the books. Perhaps more importantly, books have the luxury of taking up entire chapters to describe background, settings, and conversations; movies do not. Tolkien purists will never be satisfied with *any* adaptation of his work. Luckily for them, the source material will always be available for their enjoyment.

Otherwise Tolkien could have made an entire LoTR wiki all on his own - described the entire world(s), languages, the races, histories (from different perspectives), the religions, characters, items, etc. And maybe add some stories...

And some of us will end up reading that wiki for hours...

Then again, by now some large corp would have copyright to it and we'd have to pay a monthly subscription to have read access to it...

The planned sequel to The Hobbit is to be an original story not written by Tolkien, covering the 60 years between The Hobbit, and the Lord of the Rings."

I know that there is a lot going on during those 60 years, but none of it involves any hobbits. In fact, all the stuff that's happening is centered around Aragorn growing up and going to war, Sauron regaining his power in Mordor, after having been tossed out of Mirkwood, and Elrond's sons searching for their mother. These are unrelated story lines that are too short to constitute a movie independently.

If there is going to be another movie based on Tolkien's Middle-Earth, it should be drawn from the Silmar

I know that there is a lot going on during those 60 years, but none of it involves any hobbits.

Weren't there some battles and such that were fought right by the Shire, or at least near it? If I recall, that was the point of the Rangers, to protect the Western areas. And it's been a while, but in the books didn't the Hobbits have some knowledge of who the Rangers are? This would indicate an interaction of some sort. In any case, you still have Balin trying to recolonize Moria, and didn't some of the other dwarves stay after they killed the dragon?(been a while since I read the Hobbit, high school

In theory, you're 100% correct. There's tons of material in The Silmarillion and the other early writings that are ideal for translation into screenplays... but there's two problems: 1) Licensing; the producers would have to pay even more money to Tolkein's estate; and 2) you can't fail by overestimating the American appetite for banality, but plenty of people have failed by overestimating their appetite for intelligence and depth.

You and I, as JRRT fans, would love to see a big screen representation of The Fall of Numenor or The Tale of Beren and Luthien. These tales are the right length and the right level of complexity to permit a screenwriter plenty of artistic license and still remain faithful to Tolkein's originals. But to a studio exec, those names aren't familiar. They're only familiar to a nerds and geeks, and a minority of them at that, and they're notoriously hard to please and, even worse, known pirates and downloaders.

Nope. The Hobbit has name recognition. Kids in the 70's and 80's were given that book to read in 9th grade Lit classes. Now those kids have money and their own kids. They're going to milk that name for all it's worth.

I'll give del Toro the benefit of the doubt. He earned that with Pan's Labyrinth. But as soon as he shows signs of kowtowing to the studio execs and marketing pressures, I'm out. It will happen, the question is how many movies will it take?

As impressive as the Silmarillion is as an exercise in world building, it lacks the narrative ingenuity and poetic diction of LotR and even the humble *Hobbit*. The sheer scale and grandeur of the stories almost overshadows the characters in them. It is the personal urgency of doing the right thing that drives the action of LotR, at the end of which we see the entire providential tapestry. The characters of the Silmarillion are largely trapped by fate in a doomed struggle with a foe far beyon

I'm in favor of the sequel. In all due reverence to Tolkien, there are other authors on this planet who have done well with fantasy works. In fact every single work of modern fantasy is derivative from Tolkien's works, and if you've ever enjoyed any of them, there's a distinct risk you'll enjoy this, too.

What's more, since you haven't read this particular book, you're probably less likely to be underwhelmed by it. You can't compare the dialog to a book which doesn't exist.

Finally, I think it absolutely vital for fantasy, and all fiction everywhere, to move beyond reverence for certain works. Somehow humanity managed to move beyond Shakespeare, creating new-ish works which we prefer to his, and I believe we can move beyond Tolkien. I also feel that making a new work in that same setting can be a catalyst for that evolution.

I'm also a strong proponent of 'Lucas' Law' wherein we can democratically remove an author's control over a project if they cease to contribute to society. Introduce one too many Jar-Jar-Binks-types and the people put a referendum on the ballot to put your work into the public domain...

Tolkien's work should be eligible for this transition as well, because nothing new is coming out of it. Or nothing was, until this sequel.

...and create something new, genius. Something that would require a little more effort, something that would have a little more risk because it lacked an installed fan base. Something without a fuckin' elf.

...and create something new, genius. Something that would require a little more effort, something that would have a little more risk because it lacked an installed fan base. Something without a fuckin' elf.

Because no one has tried to do that ever. What brilliantly fresh idea!

it will be hard to nail tolkien's tone in a made up "middle movie". even if it isn't "studio committee of frat boys"ed to death, lotr fundamentalist fanboys will eviscerate it. they can deal with no tom bombadil, since its a story line that's so out of touch with the rest of lotr that it can safely be surgically removed, but whatever they do with the rumored necromancer plotline for this "middle movie" they better be damn respectful to the world of lotr:

so little is sketched by tolkien of them and the world to the east of mordor they went too, that it could make for some great lotr-type stories without stepping on any middle earth toes or the fanboys who guard the mythology's continuity

it could have an east asian or russian mythology theme, keeping in touch with all those maps that overlay mordor with either germany, transylvania, or the middle east

1.2. What will be included in the two movies?
According to the Empire Online interview with PJ and GDT (link above), the two movies will include all of the iconic moments in the book, The Hobbit, as well as being expanded to follow other events that occur ‘offstage.’ This includes the White Council and Gandalf’s comings and goings to Dol Guldur. Pj: “We expanded out the universe a lot more so that we weren’t just staying with Bilbo and the Dwarves on thei

I can see it now: the hobbits living in an advanced society not unlike 21st century Europe undergo a genetic mutation as the result of exposure to radioactive volcanic ash. One of the hobbits becomes Lord Sauron, who proceeds to rise up and conquer the lands, forming an oppressive kingdom where he removes and monopolizes all modern technology. Society within that first generation regresses to a 10th-century-style existence. Meanwhile, Lieutenant Starbuck, an astronaut who crashed on some faraway planet, helped the hobbits form a rag tag resistance group comprised of wookies, psychlo, and griffins, stumble across a cache of F-35 Lightning fighters, and although they have never seen so much as a flashlight or even matches, over the course of two weeks, become expert fighter pilots. Did I mention these F-35 Lightnings were not what they appeared, but are actually transformers, and in the bunker-style hangar they came across, there was a large semi. Well, the transformers were remaining covert to try to learn what all these strange creatures were up to since the creatures showed a barely perceptible spark of conscious thought. Optimus Prime took pity and he and his brothers revealed their true nature to the rag tag team. They agree to help the hobbits, psychlo, wookies, and griffins wage war to overthrow Sauron. The battle was quick and decisive.

Now for the Tim Burton twist ending: Glinda, the good witch told Lieutenant Starbuck "sorry man, but you have to go home now. I'll service you first." She gives him a BJ and tells him all he needs to do is to play the hokey pokey then he will be swiftly transported home. He does the hokey pokey, except he put is left foot in when he should have put in his right foot, so he landed in a parallel universe where the Earth is now ruled by giant tarantulas.

I've read Lord Of The Rings a total of five times during my life (with a 6th read planned for soon), I've listen to the BBC audio adaptation several times and I played D&D and Advanced D&D for many years.

I saw the LOTR movies once at the cinema & own the Special Edition movies which I've watched a few times - I'll even confess to shedding a quick tear when Boromir died (despite knowing it would happen) in Fellowship, when the Ents started moving in Towers, and when Bilbo and Sam were up on Mount Doom in Return.

I don't care that the films were not completely accurate to the books, they were a great adaptation that I thoroughly enjoyed & that were hopefully easy enough on the general populace to hopefully have made them realise that fantasy tales don't all start & end with Harry Potter.

Therefore I've decided that at 48 years of age, it's possible to care deeply about something you enjoy but that it's time to stop being too nerdy about stuff - after all, it's *JUST* entertainment, enjoy it & feel a bit happier about things in general, or don't enjoy it & go find something you do enjoy.

As a Star Trek fan, I was appalled 10 years ago when they started talking about a prequel movie or series to the original series, but I actually quite enjoyed Enterprise (as good as DS9 and better than Voyager) and thoroughly enjoyed the complete reboot of the franchise in the latest movie... bugger timelines, bugger proper adaptations, all that matters is whether or not I enjoyed it.

Sorry, kiddies, but when you get to my age a whole lot of stuff that used to seem really important now just gets in the way of you enjoying stuff that little bit more - so don't worry, you'll grow out of it...

Well, I read *The Hobbit* to my son when he was in 2nd grade. After I read the last word on the last page, the instant I set the book down he said, "Can we read *The Hobbit 2* next?"

Poor kid. That's just how I feel.

*The Hobbit* is greatly underestimated by even Tolkien fans, who pooh-pooh it because it's not LotR. The tone of the story is a bit condescending at first, something that Tolkien himself expressed dissatisfaction with in later years, but as in LotR there's a lot going on under the surface of *The Hobbit*. It's a story well worth serious study. Achieving that in story so readable and enjoyable on a superficial level is a tremendous achievement.

Drama is not a medium Tolkien wrote for, so we can expect The Hobbit, like the LotR film trilogy, to be largely paraphrase. The Hobbit film will be a different story set in the same world, more or less following the events of the novel.

That said,the vast world Tolkien created practically begs for more stories to be written in that setting. It's a shame that copyright prevents this. Little of what would be written would do it justice, but it's not like there's a lack of writing genius

I think the siege of Gondolin out of the Silmarillion would make a hell of a movie, as would the part where Morgoth & Ungoliant destroy the trees. Man, I need a life.
I also agree that, given the right writing, the sequel they're planning could be decent.